"The first Lisp compiler was written by Robert Brayton with the
assistance of David Park, in SAP for the 704. That compiler was started
in 1957 and was working in 1960 by which time Brayton left MIT. During
that interval of time a Lisp compiler written in Lisp was implemented by
Klim Maling but that compiler was apparently dropped. The argument
advanced was that Brayton's being written in assembly language, would
obviously be faster. Difficulties in maintenance developed when Brayton
left the project. After Brayton and Maling, Timothy Hart and Michael
Levin wrote a compiler in Lisp which was distributed with the 704 Lisp
1.5 system. The compiler that I am most familiar with and will describe
today is a descendant of that compiler."